Greetings by István Virágvölgyi

The two projections to my right are aboutsimilarity. If I told someone that there are similarilyinfamous pubs in Vienna that we all know from theHungarian countryside, everyone thought I wasdelirious. The Iron Curtain divided these two closelylinked countries for decades, so such a similarity isstill unthinkable to most people today. After all, Austria is beleived to belong to Western Europe, Hungary to Eastern Europe. Yet, if I had accidentally mixed up the two photographers’pictures on my computer when compiling theprojections, it would be hard to tell the difference.

Sure, Zsófia Sivák’s photos are of Heves Countyin the Northeast of Hungary and Klaus Pichler’s areof the Austrian capital, Vienna, but what they showin common is that the pictured disappearing placesdon’t function like the trendy specialty cafés in shopping malls that have replaced them. The latterare indeed less problematic places, they are notfrequented by troublemakers, but they also do nothave the kind of audience attachment that a goodpub offers to its regular visitors, functioning as a home-substitute. Specialty cafés driven by the logicof capitalism at its peak, are non-places, meaningthey look the same anywhere in the world, have no real character even if they try to pretend they haveone, because they lack a real core audience, theyare not home to a real community. Because theseplaces have no real soul, they are devoid of life, and the uniform steamrolling of globalisation makesthem attractive but also empty.

On the other wall, however, there are more differences, although here too there are two seriesconnected by many ideas. János Bődeyphotographs the world of Hungarian villagefestivals, community events which have a church ornational tradition, but are being transformed in an increasingly uniform world. Reiner Riedler, bycontrast, photographs Austrian festivals that havebecome creations of the festival industry, fuelled byglobalisation, gatherings without tradition, such asbodybuilding conventions, erotic fairs or, forexample, the colour run. Both types of festivals existin both countries: in Hungary we could look at theSziget Festival, which is absolutely mainstream in the festival industry, and in Austria we could alsolook at a folk Krampus festival of course. So here, the two photographers are photographing differentthings, but both are about how, with the fading of religious and national characters, we can fill theholidays of our communities with some newmeaning, how we can live out togetherness.

For me, this exhibition has two importantmessages. The first is about breaking the dichotomybetween West and East: whether, after 150 years of globalisation, it is still worth thinking in these blackand white categories, and whether it brings uscloser to a better way of living our daily lives. The other message is that it is not by chance thatdocumentary photographers often photograph thepoor, who, out of necessity and to escape their poorliving conditions, but always create theircommunities and their places of community thatsmell of life. In many ways this exhibition is theswan song of a fading world, but it is worth thinkingabout how we can replace the disappearingtroublesome pubs that few regret?